The Battle of Loos in September–October 1915 was among the earliest on the Western Front to feature divisions of Britain’s so-called New Army of civilian volunteers. The creation of the New Army was driven by the Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, who rightly believed the First World War would be a lengthy conflict, requiring a field army comprising millions of men. He resolved not to enlarge the Territorial Force, which was itself rapidly expanding following the outbreak of war, but to recruit from the civilian population of military-aged males. His New Army, also known as Kitchener’s Army, would be based on and administered by the existing regimental system. Printing presses churned out thousands upon thousands of recruiting posters featuring slogans such as ‘Your King and Country Need You’. The rallying call from the hero of the Sudan appealed to the masses. It played to communities’ patriotism and willingness to fight the enemy for King and Country, but also promised an escape from the mundane, a chance of adventure, of work and all the other myriad attractions the army held for young men of that time. Volunteers flooded in; the existing regimental structures could not cope. Civilian committees were set up to promote and manage the manpower drive. So were created the Service or Pals battalions, the latter referring to those raised from a single locality, community or stratum of society. These Pals battalions of the New Army were the pride of their communities; the dangers of concentrating any community’s best and brightest in a single military unit during a time of war had yet to be realised.
Against this backcloth of escalation towards total war, Haig advanced his career. He commanded I Corps throughout the battles of 1914. Promotion to full general came on 20 November 1914, at the end of the First Battle of Ypres. On Christmas Day he became commander of First Army during the reorganisation of the BEF by its then commander, Field Marshal French. What followed was command through the abortive battles of 1915, from which Haig managed to emerge with his reputation intact; he was subsequently feted by a string of politicians.20 Haig had a long-standing personal affinity for French, who had served with distinction in the Second Boer War but retained a difficult relationship with Kitchener. Haig’s affinity for French proved to be no barrier to his placing increasingly less store in the C-in-C’s professional ability. So began a cautious campaign of intrigue by envelope and whisper to George V, Kitchener and others. It was founded on Haig’s professional concerns, his ambition and, of course, his ever-present underlying belief that he could and indeed would do better.
Haig probably knew he was French’s most likely successor as C-in-C by the spring of 1915, and his subsequent criticism of French to several key powerbrokers back in London strongly suggests he aimed to take advantage of the situation. The poor results of 1915’s battles, the heavy casualties and finally the fine detail of the failure at Loos crystallised Haig’s belief that French had no handle on the nature of what was then modern warfare and that he had to go. French — realising he had been politically out-manoeuvred by his underling and that he had run dry on Whitehall favour — resigned as C-in-C. Fifty-five-year-old Haig took up the reins as commander of the BEF on 19 December 1915, writing at the time: ‘I had only one idea, namely to do my utmost to win the war.’21
THE ALLIED STRATEGY for 1916 was hammered out during the second Inter-Allied Conference, held at Chantilly, France, on 6–8 December 1915. General Joseph Joffre, C-in-C of the French armies, presided over military representatives from Britain (Field Marshal French, who was just about to be supplanted by Haig), France (Major-General Maurice Pellé, Joffre’s chief of staff), Russia, Italy and Serbia. Joffre set the agenda and on the third day a string of prosaically worded resolutions were signed off. It was agreed that a decisive outcome to the war could only be achieved in its principal theatres, namely the Anglo-French, Russian and Italian fronts.22 This was to be achieved by powerful, co-ordinated offensives on each, launched simultaneously or in quick succession. The resolutions continued:
The general action should be launched as soon as possible. The Allied Armies will therefore endeavour to hasten the augmentation of their resources in men and material [sic] so that they can make their maximum effort as soon as possible. It is very desirable that their maximum effort should materialise at a date as soon as possible after the end of March.23
The offensive could take place before the end of March if circumstances warranted it. Moreover, each of the separate powers should be prepared to stop a German offensive on their respective fronts, and assist the others in this situation to ‘the fullest possible extent.’24 The wearing down of the enemy by means of local and partial offensives would begin immediately. It was on these resolutions that the Anglo-French armies began lumbering towards a mid-1916 offensive in Picardy, northern France.
Britain’s Cabinet sanctioned these Chantilly resolutions following recommendations by its War Committee, which met in London on 23 and 28 December. Memos supporting the conference’s outcome were lodged by the British army’s Chief of Imperial General Staff, General Sir Archibald Murray, and then General Sir William Robertson, who replaced Murray from 23 December. The War Committee agreed on 28 December that France and Flanders would remain the main theatre of war, with resources being concentrated there rather than at other theatres. Every effort would be made to carry out offensive operations on the Western Front in the spring, in close co-operation with Britiain’s Allies and in the greatest possible strength.25 The actual plan of attack for spring, as recommended by Murray, would be ‘left to the commanders in the field.’26
That job fell to Haig. Kitchener told Haig, in a job-description letter dated 28 December, that defeat of the enemy on the Western Front by combined and co-operating Allied armies was his primary objective. Haig’s command was essentially an independent one, Kitchener stated, meaning that Haig was not subordinate to 64-year-old ‘Papa’ Joffre.27 ‘I pointed out,’ wrote Haig of a conversation with another French general about the Allied offensive, ‘that I am not under General Joffre’s orders, but that would make no difference, as my intention was to do my utmost to carry out General Joffre’s wishes on strategical [sic] matters, as if they were orders.’28 It was very much a case of all care and no responsibility.
As it turned out, the War Committee would wrangle over the Chantilly resolutions for another three months. Convened on 13 January, two weeks after the initial meetings, it added a crucial caveat to its December decision, stating ‘it must not be assumed that such offensive operations are finally decided on.’29 Haig’s mandate to begin preparing for an attack was thus heavily qualified. The principal dissenters — First Lord of the Admiralty Arthur Balfour and Minister of Munitions David Lloyd George — were opposed to a premature Western Front offensive, launched before sufficient men and materiel had been accumulated. It was not so much a question of whether, but of when. Delaying beyond spring seemed sensible.30 Come March–April, the committee’s concerns had shifted to French and Russian strategy for 1916, and what operations the latter might have in the pipeline that Britain was not immediately aware of. Lloyd George was concerned that the Allies were in danger of backsliding towards a repeat of the abortive battles of 1915, and the massive pressure on the French army at Verdun lingered in the background. The committee, along with Kitchener and Robertson, remained in favour of a concerted and considered Allied offensive. Kitchener was adamant that beginning the offensive in spring would give it sufficient time to be carried through to fulfilment,31 and that Haig would not be drawn into a purely British operation.32 The committee concluded the only effective way to support Russia’s fragile position was to launch a large Anglo-French offensive, and that satisfying Haig’s demand for weapons was a priority. Finally, on 7 April, the committee issued a firm statement in favour of a spring offensive and told Haig he now had ‘the authority for which he asks.’33
Sharp-minded and grand-bellied Joffre knew in late-December 1915 that Haig had Cabinet’s mandate for a major collaborative operation. He wrote to French-speaking Haig on 30 December, the pair havin
g met twice in the preceding week, and set out his New Year’s shopping list. Joffre had already told his 64-year-old subordinate General Ferdinand Foch — the live-wire commander of Groupe des Armées du Nord, comprising the French Sixth and Tenth Armies — to examine the possibilities for a ‘powerful offensive’ south of the River Somme. This would be conducted among a palette of other attacks at various points along the French-held portions of the Western Front, some to be part of the general offensive agreed at Chantilly and others to ‘hold the enemy in uncertainty.’34 Stout, gentle Joffre, the son of a cooper, continued:
The French offensive would be greatly aided by a simultaneous offensive of the British forces between the [River] Somme and Arras. Besides the interest which this last area presents on account of its close proximity to that where the effort of the French Armies will be made, I think that it will be a considerable advantage to attack the enemy on a front where for long months the reciprocal activity of the troops opposed to each other has been less than elsewhere.35
Three weeks later, before Haig had replied, Joffre was rapping at the door of his headquarters in St Omer with a new line of action, apparently at the behest of a French government concerned about the rising number of casualties. Before the main Allied attack on the Somme, Joffre now wanted a pair of April–May preliminaries to wear out the German army and exhaust enemy reserves. He wanted Haig to sanction a British attack north of the Somme on about 20 April and on a frontage of at least 20,000 yards (11.4 miles). Joffre, writing to Haig on 23 January, saw such attacks as critical to the French cause, and said they should comprise 15–18 British divisions and be followed by another operation elsewhere. Haig favoured a combined operation but was opposed to Joffre’s proposals, which would exhaust the British army, run up casualties and ultimately be regarded as failures because they failed to produce decisive results.
Haig and Joffre squared these differences at a mid-February conference. ‘I am glad to say,’ crowed Haig in a letter to George V, ‘that on both points [the second being for the British army to take over the French Tenth Army’s front near Arras, as raised by Joffre in December 1915] they gave way and agreed to my arguments.’36 Joffre quit his plans for April–May preliminary enterprises and Haig agreed that an Anglo-French offensive should be carried on astride the Somme on or about 1 July, preceded a few weeks earlier by a partial attack at the La Bassée–Ypres area of southern Belgium. Haig also agreed that if a German offensive was launched in Russia then the Anglo-French attack would begin as soon as possible. So it was that the origins of the first day of the Somme were seeded amid the tangle of Anglo-French relations with the bald strategy of attrition.
There was, as one historian has written, a trinity of military perspectives to attrition:
For the allies, strategic attrition meant overstretching and grinding down Germany’s powers of resistance to such a point that she would break; operational attrition meant using up the army’s manpower reserves to break the Western Front stalemate, restore mobile warfare and force the German army back to the Rhine; and tactical attrition meant killing Germans on the Somme, with inevitable loss to the attackers at the same time.37
These were the Anglo-French views of attrition, but the German high command had no intention of being forced back to its home-country borders. It was already planning to open the Battle of Verdun on the banks of the River Meuse, about 150 miles east of Paris.
Even by the morally bankrupt standards of trench fighting on the Western Front, Verdun marked the start of an altogether more horrifying style of machine-age warfare. General-der-Infanterie Erich von Falkenhayn, the German Chief of General Staff, Supreme Army Command, planned the offensive to run up French casualties and force a compromised peace.38 It began on 21 February 1916 when 1220 German artillery guns belched a dawn-till-dusk tempest of steel over the French positions, raging destruction and death and flinging men and debris about. Then German infantry went in. So the formula was repeated for three days. On 25 February, Fort Douamont, one of several key elements of the French defences, fell. French reserves were thrown into battle and gradually stabilised the tottering line. The fighting spluttered along in fits and starts of shellfire that pulverised villages, churned their ruins into the clay and left a sea of overlapping craters that reeked of stagnant water and death. The onslaught continued until 18 December, claiming more than 330,000 German casualties and 377,000 French.39 This was industrialised warfare on a scale far beyond that seen in 1915; but, as always, whichever army and nation endured the longest, had the greater resources and suffered the least casualties would win the grotesque attritional contest. The strategy was not lost on Allied leaders who resolved to answer Falkenhayn’s tough question at Verdun with a Somme rejoinder; the two offensives were umbilically linked spectres born of a mother named ‘Attrition.’
Haig’s interest in a Belgium offensive lingered, even as the Somme moved centre stage and the vicious Verdun fighting rumbled along. He had, as early as 14 January — the day after the War Committee imposed its caveat — told General Sir Herbert Plumer, commander of Second Army, to consider schemes in Belgium against the Messines–Wytschaete ridge, Lille and the forest of Houthulst.40 Three months later, having just received the War Committee’s go-ahead, Haig told Plumer to begin preparations for the capture of the ridge, using 20 large mines rammed with explosives to obliterate German defences.41 The successful Battle of Messines eventually took place in mid-1917 as a precursor to the Third Ypres offensive. Meantime, at the end of May, Haig told Plumer to accelerate his preparations, as the northern offensive might be launched ahead of the Somme, and by 5 June he was considering switching the main British effort to Plumer’s sector if Fourth Army met stubborn resistance.42 At General Headquarters (GHQ) in St Omer, Haig’s staff were also exploring the possibility of a semi-amphibious attack along the French coast from Nieuport towards Ostende, but this did not eventuate. Throughout early 1916 Haig saw an offensive in southern Belgium as either an alternative or a complement to the Somme, and only put these plans on hold once the fighting in Picardy had begun to put a squeeze on all available resources.43
GENERAL SIR HENRY Rawlinson’s rise to the command of Fourth Army followed a career of service in India, Burma, Sudan and South Africa. He was born in London in 1864 to a well-off family. His father was a wellconnected British East India Company army officer, politician and keen scholar of all things Mesopotamian. Rawlinson was educated at Eton, and graduated from the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, aged 19 in 1884 as an infantry lieutenant. Service in King’s Royal Rifle Corps and Coldstream Guards followed, as did stints in India as Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick (later Lord and Field Marshal) Roberts’ aide-de-camp (1884–6), and in Burma (1886–7). The tall, lanky Rawlinson campaigned against the Dervishes of Sudan as part of Kitchener’s staff in the dusty advance on Omdurman (1898), and commanded a field column with distinction in South Africa (1899–1902). Back in England, he became commandant of the Staff College (1903–6). Promotions followed, first to brigadiergeneral commanding 2nd Infantry Brigade at Aldershot (1907–9), and then Major-General commanding 3rd Division on Salisbury Plain (1910). Shortly after war broke out in 1914, ‘Rawly’ took command of 4th Division in France. Then followed command of IV Corps (1914–15) as lieutenantgeneral, and of Fourth Army from January 1916. Rawlinson was always regarded as a ‘star man’ within the officer corps and his rise to the helm of Fourth Army was linked to the breadth of his service, the patronage of Roberts and Kitchener,44 and the necessary wartime expansion of the British army.
Rawlinson was a complex character. Casual acquaintances found him a cheery, affable soul with a good sense of humour. This was army cinematographer Lieutenant Geoffrey Malins’ experience: ‘While waiting [to film], the General came over to me and began chatting about my work.’45 Lieutenant-General Sir Alexander Godley, a pallbearer at Rawlinson’s 1925 funeral, wrote in his 1939 autobiography that the balding army commander was ambitious, clever and charming.46 War correspondent Philip
Gibbs thought the general ‘genial’ with a ‘roguish eye,’ and said he possessed ‘initiative and courage of decision and a quick intelligence.’47 But he suspected there was more to the moustachioed ‘Cad’ — as Rawlinson was sometimes known — than his avuncular veneer implied:
Before the battles of the Somme I had a talk with him among his maps, and found that I had been to many places in his line which he did not seem to know. He could not find them very quickly on his large-sized maps, or pretended not to, though I concluded that this was ‘camouflage,’ in case I might tell ‘old Fritz’ that such places existed.48
Others were mistrustful. Charteris thought Rawlinson professionally capable, but suspected him of wanting to supplant Haig.49 The C-in-C described him as an intelligent and experienced commander but believed him to be fundamentally insincere.50 Major-General Francis Davies, whom Rawlinson had attempted to scapegoat for his own piecemeal use of reserves at Neuve Chapelle, was altogether more damning. An embittered Davies said he and his staff had lost confidence in Rawlinson because they believed that if his ‘personal interests required it, he [Rawlinson] would throw over his subordinate Commanders and that he would not hold to any [verbal] order which he had given.’51 Rawlinson was likeable when it suited, evasive when convenient and a ruthless, devious careerist who had no qualms when it came to advancing his own interests at the expense of others.52
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